Monday, December 03, 2007

The SMS Novelists

I can barely fathom this:

In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage

"In just a few years, mobile phone novels - or keitai shousetsu - have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns and making their authors a small fortune in the process.

Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies."

via TechCrunch (with inspiration from Kit)

3 comments:

SpaceMonkeyMojo said...

A writer friend of mine and I have been writing a story one sentence at a time for the past year and a half.

We have 80 pages of the most complicated armageddon/conspiracy comedy ever written.

Its deep philosophical ramblings and reflections on western civilization with slapstick and fart jokes.

I'm wondering now if this is content we can monetize - not on cellphones - but a blog. One sentence at a time. One sentence a day.

Might be worth a shot...

SpaceMonkeyMojo said...

Uh, let me clarify. I mean I write a sentence. Then he writes the next sentence. And then back and forth. We do this through email.

Standard "Improv" rules apply. So the loose rules between us are:

1. No discussion of future plotlines.
2. Discussion of past plotlines okay, only in so much as they don't reflect and plans for the future (no spoliers)
3. You must "yes-and" Meaning if someone writes "A purple monster is attacking" the next sentence can't be "actually, it was yellow." Saying yes meaning confirming what the last author just said and then adding new information.

Jake of All Trades said...

Bo and I had batted around the concept of a "wiki novel" that would be a similar collaboration, though not exactly "alternating sentences" as you've been doing.

Decided to Google it, and it seems Penguin sponsored just that earlier this year:

A Million Penguins